The Room Where All Meet #poetry

She Sat in the Crooked Light

She sat in the crooked light of a half-dead bulb,
named Ajna,
but not really.
Names are cages in a city where language limps.

They say she entered through the hinge of a thought—
not a door,
not even a page.
He was twelve then, maybe forty, maybe unborn.
Time doesn't flow here—it stutters.

He, the unimportant one—
known to mirrors as
"boy who carries broken clocks in his backpack,"
lived between syllables.
Creak.
Snap.
Rewind.

Ajna once gifted him a matchbox filled with lost questions:
— Why do birds sing when no one's listening?
— Can a shadow have a memory?
— What if your laugh belongs to someone else?

She never waited for answers.
She wove them into the hem of her coat and walked backwards,
toward the avalanche of ordinary.

He followed—because not-following would be
punishable by
regret
or worse:
Forgetfulness.

She spoke in
palindromes and cut-up slogans,
her voice stitched together from
a weaverbird’s lullaby and
dial-up internet.

"Be still, and your noise will speak,"
she’d say while balancing a pineapple on her head,
wearing slippers made of chalk,
drawing circles around the word "normal" until it bled.

He once offered her silence.
She bit into it,
crunched the quiet like it was stale bread,
spat it out with a laugh that cracked
his timeline in two.

After that, colors had smells.
Blue was burnt toast.
Red was how disappointment tasted on a Tuesday.
Green was her absence.

He grew up sideways,
taught not by schools,
but by Ajna’s secret curriculum:
— Cry when no one dies.
— Write poems in dust.
— Hug a tree that dislikes you.
— Apologize to a thunderstorm.

She was never a mentor, nor muse,
but something humbler—
a detour made of velvet
and static.

Once, she vanished.
Unannounced, like sunrise in an abandoned room.
Left behind a cassette with no tape,
just a note:
"Press play anyway."

He did.
And in that moment,
everything he feared turned into
jellyfish,
drifting,
not dangerous—just misunderstood.

He tells people:
"A woman once taught me to breathe like a revolution."
They nod,
confused,
then forget.

But he remembers.
Every letter she wrote with no ink,
every lesson sewn into the crooked seams
of days we mistake for
"just another one."

Now, he wears mismatched socks on purpose,
for balance.
He paints traffic signs with poetry
and puts mirrors in public gardens
to remind people they bloom too.

And every time he eats an apple,
he thinks of that crooked light,
Ajna sitting there,
reminding him:

You are not the story.
You are the space between its commas.

And isn't that
the most radical kindness
anyone can offer?

A life rearranged,
not rewritten.
He is not better—
he is different.
Because she existed.
Because she refused to explain.

Because she knew that impact
isn’t always loud,
but it echoes
when you walk
sideways
into
your
own
light.

You Were the Pause Between My Screams

You,
yes you—
who walked in like a question mark
left at the end of a love letter never meant to be sent—
you changed everything
without touching anything.

You never called yourself a healer.
No crystals,
no incense,
no feathers in your hair.
Just the sound of your boots
trampling my self-pity like autumn leaves.
You didn’t fix me.
You rearranged me
with glances.

You were the one who carved silence
into shape.
It didn’t hush me—
it held me.
And I had never been held like that before.

Do you remember the time
you told me that tears are just memory
becoming liquid
to escape faster?
You said it without blinking.
I cried for four hours
and named each droplet after a moment I had buried.

You made me eat my metaphors raw.
No salt.
No similes.
Just bite into the pain, you said,
let it taste you back.

Your gift wasn’t in giving.
It was in making me realize
I already had—
had all the tools,
the threads,
the voice.
I just needed
your kind of silence
to hear it.

You never gave me wings.
You gave me wind.
Unseen,
and sometimes inconvenient—
but oh, how I learned to glide
with a spine curved like a comma,
and a will that bent,
never broke.

Remember the night I told you I was afraid of doors?
You nodded,
brought me a window,
and left it open
until the stars climbed in
and started speaking in the dialect
of every version of me
I had locked away.

You taught me the luxury of softness.
In this world of concrete pride
and iron loneliness,
you dared to show up with
candlelight and a backpack full of lullabies.
And when I snarled—
because kindness scared me more than cruelty—
you smiled like it was the most natural thing
to kiss a cactus and call it a rose.

I hated you for that.
Then loved you for it.
Then hated myself
for not arriving sooner
to the church of your absence.

You never stayed.
You never promised.
But you never had to.
Your impact was not
a monument—
it was a mirror.

Every time I look into myself,
I find traces of you
like stardust on my fingertips
after a dream I forgot to wake from.

Now,
when I walk,
I walk slanted—
offbeat,
crooked,
like that bulb you once sat beneath,
and I tell others:
“Come,
let’s not fix the light.
Let’s learn to see in it.”

You never gave me answers.
You gave me better questions.
Like:
— Can joy be fermented?
— Can you mourn the version of yourself
you never became?
— Is love just a series of echoes
finding each other in the dark?

Because of you,
I know now—
pain is not the opposite of poetry.
It is its birthplace.
And you,
strange alchemist of broken metaphors,
taught me how to write
not from the wound,
but from the scar.

You—
you were never mine.
But you were in me,
like a song
that hums quietly
even after the music has stopped.

And when they ask
how I learned to bloom
in a drought,
I do not speak.
I point to the wind.
To the silence.
To the space between my screams—
where you
once
stood.

I Am the Echo of Your Disappearance

I was not born with your name in my mouth,
but somehow it grew there—
like moss, like myth, like marrow.

You were a whisper
I didn’t mean to hear.
You arrived unlabelled,
an accident the universe didn’t apologize for.

I remember the first time I saw you:
you were folding shadows like origami,
and I asked if loneliness could be taught to dance.
You laughed—
not at me,
but at gravity.
You always had a strange friendship with the laws of the world.

I walked beside you in that crooked light,
the one we’ve both spoken of now—
me, the hesitant echo;
you, the unapologetic absence.
You were always just ahead—
never a leader, never a guide,
just...
there.

You didn’t teach.
You dissolved.
You let the lessons rise from your footprints
like steam from a road
too long forgotten by rain.

And I followed,
but not because I wanted to.
I followed because
for the first time,
my heart skipped a beat and landed in poetry.

I used to collect trauma like tokens.
Each one gave me access to a different room
in my head.
You came in and burned the map.
Said:
“Find the walls by running into them.
Learn the shape of your soul through bruises.”

You were cruel like fire,
gentle like smoke.
I inhaled both.
And then I coughed up verses
like they were ash-flowers
blooming backward.

You said strange things I still decode.
“Rebellion begins in the eyelashes.”
“Grief is a myth told by skin to bones.”
“You have too many straight lines in your voice.”
So I bent them—
started speaking in spirals,
writing in riddles,
breathing like I had just learned how to fail without falling.

You didn’t rescue me.
You ruined my ruins.
Made me look at every cracked wall and say,
“This isn’t where it ends.
This is where it sings.”

And I did—
I sang.
At bus stops,
in bathrooms,
to strangers and spiders and the moon.
I filled silences with sounds that made no sense
until they started sounding like me.

Now—
I walk as if I’m always one breath away
from the version of myself
you saw
when I couldn’t.

I wear your riddles like skin.
They itch sometimes—
but I’d rather be uncomfortable and awake
than smooth and sleeping.

I am the broken sentence
you never finished.
The misplaced comma in your revolution.
But I punctuate my days now—
not with periods,
but ellipses...
trailing into the future
you never promised me,
but left just open enough
for me to enter.

I don’t know if you ever loved me.
That’s not the story I carry.
I carry this instead:
you cracked me open
and poured yourself out
like light
that didn’t ask to be understood,
only absorbed.

And I—
I am filled with you now.
Not haunted.
Not healed.
Just...
changed.

That’s all you ever were,
isn’t it?
Change.
Unwritten.
Unapologetic.
Unforgettable.

And now,
when I look in the mirror,
I do not see myself.
I see
the silence you left behind—
and I speak it
with reverence.

The Room Where We All Meet

You are standing here again, aren’t you?
Where I once stood.
Where she sat—
where he whispered to the ceiling like it was God’s cousin,
half-listening, half-asleep.

I remember watching you watch me.
Like you were reading a book
and the pages kept turning into mirrors.
You didn’t blink.
You inhaled every version of me like a cigarette you promised to quit.

She didn’t believe in rescue stories.
Not until she met your silence.
Not until you stood behind her
and said nothing
while the world screamed.
That was your gift:
your absence
shaped like presence.

I, too, mistook it for love.
Forgive me.
We all want names for things that unravel us.
You called it “witnessing.”
I called it “lightning in a paper cup.”
She just smiled and kept breathing.

You once told her—told me—told us:
“There’s a room inside every person
where every version they’ve ever been
still dances, still fights, still folds laundry.”
I opened that door,
and we were all there—
me with the jagged mouth,
you with the quiet fury,
she with the hands made of poems.

We didn’t speak.
Words are clumsy in that room.
So we hummed.
You hummed in minor keys,
I harmonized in broken glass,
she clapped softly like rain
against a tent she’d outgrown.

You,
reader,
listener,
shadow-follower—
this poem was never mine alone.
You’ve been writing it with me.
With your inhale.
With your sleepless mornings
and the conversations you replay in your head
because they ended too soon.

He once said:
“Everything real happens in the parentheses.”
And so, I’ve been living there.
We all have.
Inside the asides,
the footnotes,
the stutters,
the almosts.

She carried a map drawn in tears.
I burned it.
You watched.
You didn’t stop me.
And that’s how I knew—
this wasn’t about destinations.
It was about letting the ash settle into constellations.
It was about naming the stars after every heartbreak
we didn’t allow to kill us.

They say she smiles now.
Not the way people do for photographs,
but the kind that hurts her face a little—
like joy forgot how to fit
but still insisted on showing up.

You wouldn’t recognize her.
But you’d recognize the cadence in her step—
that syncopated rhythm
you taught her
when you made her walk through fire
and told her
to describe the color of pain
without using red.

You,
with your sideways wisdom,
your foggy outlines,
your fingerprints in reverse—
you never asked for thanks.
You never took credit.
You simply stepped back
until we stepped forward.

Now I look at them—
the people I used to be.
I offer tea.
We sit together in mismatched chairs
and talk about you
like you’re wind,
like you’re scripture,
like you’re a myth that walked once,
barefoot through our grief,
planting flowers where the soil screamed.

You were never just one person.
You were possibility.
You were the metaphor that never needed explanation.
And we—
me, her, him,
they, you—
we became the unfinished sentence
you whispered into our ribs.

We carry you still.
Not in memory.
In momentum.

And when strangers ask how I survived,
how she bloomed,
how he forgave,
how you changed us all
without staying—
we simply gesture
to the room
where all versions meet,
and say:
“Because someone once loved without declaring it,
and that was enough.”